


Shrine

by saintsrow2



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 01:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8558542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: The Outsider stopped visiting Corvo eventually. [Chinese translation also available].





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译】Shrine 圣坛](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14557350) by [YTyuzhihan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YTyuzhihan/pseuds/YTyuzhihan)



> I wrote this in like an hour because I was very filled with Dishonored related emotionssssss after crying about corvosider for five hours.
> 
> Edit: Thanks to YTyuzhihan this fanfic has now been translated into Chinese! It's available here. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14557350

He built the shrine by himself, in the quiet secret stretch of the Tower only he knows the way to. He has to blink up there, crawl through space between the ceiling and floor on his belly, but that’s the price of keeping things secret. No one can know about this; it would cost him his job, his home, and both those things would mean losing his daughter again. He knows there are nobles out there who keep their shrines in pretty cupboards, hidden only by a key that their servants could easily get a hold of, but he isn’t going to afford himself such laziness. He’s been in noble homes before and felt the presence of charms and runes just a few feet above his head, and sometimes the pull to take them for his own was too strong to resist.

Sometimes, a lot of the time, all the time. But he needs them more than they do, deserves them more than they do, and he’s gone to much greater lengths to gather charms and runes before. Crawling through dirt and grime, surrounded by rats that rip at his bare flesh, all to pry a charm out of the hands of a dead man. He’d do more, he’d do worse.

He’d built the shrine nearly a month after coming home. There’d been so much to do, and the time with Emily had taken precedence over everything else. He loved her, in a way he never believed he would be able to love anything, and wanted to make up for every missed second. Even then, there was the battle to regain his status, to convince people he was not the monster they thought he was. He didn’t miss any of it; the desperation, the horror, the blood on his hands. The visits from the Outsider were the last thing on his mind, he had no need for the whispered meetings in the Void. But the weeks ticked by, and he started doubting that any of that was true.

He dreamt about the blood almost constantly, but what stuck with him every morning when he was woke was the loneliness. He never would have imagined how potent the feeling of isolation could be.

At first he thought it was all about _her_. And a good deal of it was, the lack of her presence in the Tower was a grief so physical he had nearly choked on it the first few times. But it wasn’t the love of her that made him think about how easily he could stop time, slit the throats of every man in the room during meetings when his mind grew idle. It wasn’t the love of her that made him stand in the basements late at the night, listening to the rats scratching in the walls with something that was nothing like revulsion. He loved more than just _her_.

Putting the shrine together had taken effort, almost more than he’d been expecting. He was just planning on throwing together some wood as quickly as possible, a few planks in roughly the correct arrangement, just somewhere to put his runes to calm a piece of his mind. But when he’d seen what a mess it was, he felt a stronger kind of guilt than he had in a long, long time. In the end, it took days to make it something he could look at with some kind of pride. This was a monument to a god, and it needed to look like one.

He had never considered himself a worshipper. He was marked, that much was not up for debate, but he wasn’t a cultist, not a heretic in the same way those who scrawled on walls and carved charms were. It got harder to deny when he was draping his altar in layers of purple fabric, lighting candles around the runes he’d gathered.

It was hard living on the run, knowing that you were a wanted man, that the next slip up could very well be your last. No man was meant to live on the edge like that, with the only options being _succeed_ or _die_ , not knowing who was going to turn on you. Having to see your friends turn on you. Yes, it was hard living on the run.

It was hard coming home.

He went to the shrine rarely, at first. Once every week, if that. Maybe he didn’t want to think of himself as desperate, it could have only been pride denying himself this small attempt at comfort. Pride, or guilt again, that he had not been restored impossibly to perfect happiness by returning home.

Every time he had gone to a shrine, one built by the people he considered cultists, the ones who were real worshippers, deranged in their love in a way he was not, the Void had opened itself up to him. But it didn’t work anymore. He tried to stop going, and then he started going every night for a few weeks, and then he tried to stretch out the visits to be at random intervals, like he had a chance of taking the Void by surprise when it was least expecting him.

He sits in front of the shrine now. It is the few scarce hours between the late-night staff going to sleep and the early morning staff waking up, and he is crouched in front of the shrine in his sleep clothes. He is half in the foetal position, knees drawn up to his chest and arms around his head, hands clutching at his hair. He looks at the shrine through the gap between his arms, his eyes burning from the lack of sleep. Fixated on the runes, he knows he hasn’t moved in hours, his muscles aching from the effort of holding his position. He could move, he should move, but there is a terrifying thought that he has been alone all this time solely because he hasn’t had the patience to stay just that minute longer.

Turning from a monster to a hero was a transition he did not take well to. People love the idea of the man who did everything he could to save the lost princess, the hero who fought to rescue the stolen child. He will be remembered in history; his name will go down in record. But right now, he has never felt more forgotten.

It is a different thing to love and to be understood. His daughter loves him irrationally, unquestioningly, but she is too young, too inexperienced to understand him. His friends, he could count on the fingers of one hand, and none of them could understand. He is tired, he is blood-soaked, he is haunted by nightmares and the weight of his mistakes. There is one who has seen all, knows all, the one he has nothing to confess to.

He watches the shrine, words on his lips he could never say allowed, and he waits to be told he is interesting, worthy of time again. He does not know then how long he must wait.

In so many ways this was never truly his home.


End file.
